February 7th, 7 PM

Trinity Square Video is proud to present Love After Materialism, a screening of work that arouses contemplation of love, longing, and desire after the virtualization of social relations. Taking a sincere (as opposed to a critical) approach to their work, Cécile B. Evans (Berlin/London), Karilynn Ming Ho (Vancouver), Jaakko Pallasvuo (Helsinki), and Heather Phillipson (London) offer insight into our contemporary capacity for closeness in the absence of physical proximity.

The materialism in Love After Materialism is twofold. First, it is a Marxist understanding of materialism; it is love after the ubiquity of capitalism and the accumulation of goods as a surrogate for emotional capital. Second, it is the physicality of material; it is love after the digitization of social interactions and how the lack of physical contact impacts our capacities for relating to others.

The works in this program provide emotional reflection on how the virtualization and monetization of social interaction has reconfigured our capacities for relating to others, for intimacy, and for love. They are unabashedly lyrical; using rhythm, poetry, song, and pop culture to seduce the viewer into a relationship with the presented subjects/images. They portray digitized, desiring bodies that hover in between the promise of immortality and the threat of obsolescence, creating slippages between sex, language, and consumption. Love After Materialism plays with the distancing effect of social technologies, materializing abstract longings, and virtual sentimentality in intimate interplays between virtualization, sexualization, and commodification in a virtual exchange through emotional economies of desire.